A good time to leave the country?

Like the other first year students working on experiments at CERN, part of my PhD is to spend a some time living and working in Geneva. The other five are already here, but other commitments have kept me in London for the past year.

With the help of the UK Liaison office at I planned to come out at immediately after the RAL Summer School that has been written about before. Before I left for Oxford all my stuff was boxed and ready to be shipped out leaving me about a month after my rent ended there to live out of a rucsac.

Despite having picked the most difficult time possible to come out, only just after the LHC first beam event, I was found a studio flat in Servette. So on Monday morning I said goodbye to London and headed for Heathrow. A couple of hours later I was leaving Geneva Airport loaded with more baggage than was good for me and a faint sense of foreboding.

A bus ride later I was at CERN picking up keys, braving the User's Office and then trying to work out my way back to the flat. The next day my stuff arrived, only a few hours late.

On Wednesday we had the "CMS September Fest" to celebrate the first beam through the experiment, the cumulation of twenty years work for some (quite a humbling feeling, having only been working on it for a mere year). Perhaps 1000 members of the collaboration came to the surface assembly building at Point 5 for a night of food, drink and a live performance of the LHC rap video many of you have probably seen (with dancers not anonymous this time - Tom).

Unfortunately this was slightly overshadowed by the news that due to a helium leak there are significant delays to the LHC - at least two months for warm-up, repair and cooldown of the affected section, and it seems unlikely that there will be any collisions until early 2009.

And to round off an eventful week, within a couple days of cooking for myself unsupervised I managed to food poison myself and spend the remaining two days in bed. Apparently French isn't the only thing I need to brush up on...